Turner Gill: Emphatically Not Mark Mangino

It's safe to say Kansas was looking for a change after it became public knowledge that former head coach Mark Mangino spent most of his offseason thinking up ever-more humiliating ways to address players who dropped balls in practice.

They found that change in the personage of Turner Gill, a universally-liked former athlete who resembles a Yosemite Sam version of Violet Beauregarde post-fantastic-gum in no way whatsoever. The only way in which Gill could be further removed from Mangino is if he knew nothing about football, which is probably a bad trait in a football coach. In all other ways, he is not Mark Mangino.

And now Turner Gill would like to emphatically emphasize this:

"It probably doesn't have to be this way," Gill said in response to a question about how he selected his assistant coaches, "but I decided that I was not going to hire anybody who was going to be cursing and using that type of language. We are here to develop these people as young men, so we don't need to do that."

Gill is currently scouring local libraries for a linebackers coach.

No, seriously, Turner Gill is not Mark Mangino. He is going to tell you this every five seconds until you start to secretly loathe him:

Gill told the crowd about a player he had at the University of Buffalo who confided that he did not often tell his mom that he loved her. So Gill set the player up on a schedule to call his mom at 2 p.m. each Sunday. Not only that, Gill would check in with the mother occasionally to see if the calls were still coming.

In two years, you will find yourself in church next to Turner Gill. He will breathe through his nose. It will whistle. You will scream "breathe through your damn mouth," and he will look at you. His eyes will contain nothing but concern for your well-being and forgiveness. You will cry yourself to sleep for the next ten days until Gill comes to you in a dream and suggests you call your mom more often.

Reached for comment, Mangino swore several tiny dragons into existence during a minute-long rant that even R. Lee Ermey, then four thousand miles away, was subconsciously terrified by.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.